by Amy Lane
Yeah, sure, nobody wanted to say “fuck like rabbits” when you were talking about angels of the Lord who had sort of deserted their posts, but Teague knew what those guys were doing up there in their open-sky tree house most days, and he knew it wasn’t planting daisies.
Which was fine—Teague was getting laid plenty himself—but he wasn’t going to pretend that what Shep and Jefi had going on with their musical angel moans and poetic angel sighs was not the exact same deal Teague had going on when he banged Jacky from behind as Jacky had his face buried between Katy’s thighs.
Good shit, yeah, and there were times when it was even holy, but unless those angels were coming silver and gold tinsel, Teague was pretty sure the whole reason they’d crashed into Green’s party was to party like the people did.
So they got to be interrupted just as often as Teague and Jack and Katy did, and that was pretty damned often if you included Jack and Katy going to work and Teague doing everything from auto maintenance to listening for when Cory went for a walk so he could be on designated-friend walking duty to make sure that all went well. Right now it was designated-friend waddling duty, and often she needed to lean on Renny’s feline shoulders to finish her short loop around the hill. It hurt him to see her so slow, but it didn’t surprise him. She’d been fond of throwing her little body around as though it weren’t no big thing, but Teague had been old enough when he’d been bitten to know that eventually your body got you back for shit like that.
In the garden, Teague waited for a moment until he heard… oh yeah. Shep had a sort of sonorous groan when he was coming, like a french horn climaxing in a symphony.
And there, right there… Jefi’s sigh, like bells.
Okay, wait to make sure they’re done… yes. The low laughter. Mm-hm. Well, Teague really was bonded to his mates, but trying to match his postcoital sounds to Shep and Jefi’s was making him really want his mates. In the hard-cocked way that left him even more impatient than usual. Next to him, Max made an uncomfortable sound that told Teague he wasn’t the only one—and unlike Teague, Max wasn’t bonded for shit. Apparently angel sex didn’t subscribe to heteronormative values any more than it obeyed Goddess-get-mating strictures.
“Are they doing what I think they’re doing?” Cerise asked, her voice as earthy as it was curious.
“Oh, Shep—do you hear? There’s humans in the garden again.” Jefischa sounded very excited, although people must come to the garden all the time.
“No,” Shep corrected, because he was an officious fucker. “One of them is a werecat, one is a werewolf, and the other one is… well, she’s a werewolf, but….”
Teague heard some rustling, followed by that powerful, near-silent whoosh-whoosh-whoosh as the angels swept downward. Teague was grateful they’d both put on jeans, but their bare torsos testified that yes, they really had been sent down from heaven to fuck like lemmings.
Well, Teague had always guessed sex was sublime with the right person. Now he had his proof.
“So, yeah, guys,” Teague said, nodding to both of them. “Max and me want to know exactly what she is.”
“She’s a werewolf,” Shep said, squinting at her.
Cerise stared back, her mouth parted a little. “Holy God.”
“No, my friend,” Shep said patiently. “We were once agents of our Lord, and then we fell.”
Jefischa’s laughter had a positively dirty ring to it. “Falling was the best part.”
Cerise’s big, black-fringed brown eyes were almost Looney-Tunes big.
“They’re totally freaking her out,” Max pronounced. “Great idea, Teague, now she’ll be a basket case.”
“No,” Teague admonished. “Look, they already know there’s something going on with her—”
“I told you the truth!” Cerise protested. Teague patted her shoulder almost unconsciously.
“That you know,” he said. “This woman has set traps with people before. Guys? You remember how awful it was when Iris exploded?”
The angels had been nearly inconsolable. Green had needed to send people—elves, shape-shifters, vampires, only the purest of heart would do—to hold them and stroke their hands until the psychic imprint of Iris Masterson’s death had faded.
“Yes,” Jefi said soberly, nodding. “You’d like very much for this one not to explode.”
Teague smiled. “That’s pretty much why I’m here.”
Shepherd was all business. “Come here, child,” he commanded. Cerise ventured forward tentatively, her arm outstretched.
“Can I touch….”
“No,” Shepherd apologized, and just as her hand would have made contact, the feathers seemed to part and jump away from her touch. “The only one who comes close is your little Goddess, and we’re not sure why. But I would like to simply hold your hand, if that is acceptable?”
“Yeah,” Cerise said, humbled. “Sure. Why not. Vampires in the basement, angels in the garden, fuckin’ elves and were-everything in between.” She looked over her shoulder at Teague, almost accusing him. “Do you know a vampire cooked me dinner last night? She told me to tell her if it needed more garlic.” Cerise’s laugh was semihysterical. “Garlic!”
Oh, no. Teague had dealt with enough tough, self-sufficient women to know when a breakdown was imminent.
“Max, uh, you wouldn’t want to get my wife, would you?”
Behind them the trapdoor opened, and for a moment Teague thought maybe some sort of mate telepathy had kicked in and it really was Katy.
Then Cory called down the steps, her voice shrill and irritated, “See? I got to the top, Bracken. On my own power. It’s a fucking miracle. Should I take my underwear off now and show them to you? I’d better be fucking careful or they’ll catch wind and I’ll parachute away!”
Then she looked up and met the horrified eyes of her audience.
“Oh. Fucking awesome.” Her freckled face flushed. “None of you get to see my underwear.”
“Thank God,” Teague said, honestly and sincerely grateful. He walked forward and offered his arm. “Now sit down before you pass out.”
She glared at him. “Shut up. What are you—” She looked around and did a mental head count. “—five conspiring about today?”
Teague put his hand on the small of her back and escorted her to the bench in spite of her reluctance. God. Goddess. Whatever. Her face was pale under her flush, and she had bags under her eyes he could ship to Tahiti.
“There is no conspiracy here, my lady,” he said primly. She rolled her eyes.
“Don’t bullshit me. Please. I am in no mood for bullshit.”
“Then you should stay out of the fields to the south,” Jefischa said, nodding. “They have a lot of cows.”
Cory smiled at him, obviously charmed in spite of her irritation. “Thank you, Jefi. I’ll be sure to avoid cows at all costs.” Her eyes narrowed at Teague. “And perfidious best friends—”
“Enforcers,” Teague said evenly. “In this matter, I’m an enforcer.”
She rolled her eyes, and even he felt how wrong that was. “Whatever. What is it we’re doing here?”
Well, that was actually easy to answer. “We’re having the angels look for any, uhm, time bombs. You know, like—”
Cory’s mouth thinned. The memory was probably as unpleasant for her as it was for the angels. “Iris,” she muttered. Yeah—only Cory and Green had been in the room, but the legend of the cleanup had permeated the hill. Bad. Just… bad. “So, any luck?”
Shepherd hmmed in his throat. “There’s… uhm, a tick under her skin.”
They all stared at Cerise as her eyes widened. She opened her mouth and gasped a few times, then scared the hell out of everybody by screaming, waving her arms, and crawling up Shepherd’s back squealing, “Get it off get it off get it off!”
Teague, Cory, and Max looked at each other in surprise and then burst into horrified laughter as they watched Shepherd try—with dignity—to divest himself of a screaming, spazzing girl, so hum
an in that moment she didn’t even think to turn into a wolf.
“Little Goddess,” Shepherd asked, the restraint never leaving his voice, “a little help, please….”
“Of course,” Cory gasped between whoops of laughter. “Not a problem.” Without even standing up, she held out her hand and engulfed Cerise in a blue power bubble, which detached itself from Shepherd. Then Cory held the girl about twelve feet off the ground and waited for her to notice that she was, once again, locked in a force field.
It took about five minutes, and she only stopped spazzing because she exhausted herself.
In the meantime, everybody on the ground looked at her in fascination as she ran around in circles, her hands grasping at skin and ripping through hair as she screamed “Get it off, get it off, get it off!”
“Oh, hey,” Cory said after a moment. “Look. Through the shield. Do you see it? In her bicep?”
Teague looked and knew his eyes widened. “Oh, wow. Max?”
“Yeah—it’s purple. Like, the shield shows it… is that under her skin?”
“Yes,” Shepherd said mournfully. He was sitting on the ground between Jefi’s knees as Jefi groomed his hair and feathers gently, soothing the scratches on his face and neck with gentle fingers. “That is the tick.”
It was, in fact, a bite mark. “So that’s how elf-bitch did it,” Teague murmured. “The wolf who bit her must have just fed from elf-bitch. Not like Connor, who got a werewolf bite and got away. I’d hazard that this wolf had just freshly re-upped. Just enough to leave a little bit of whatserface lodged in her flesh.”
Cory squinted at the wound through the bubble. At this point, Cerise had collapsed into a whimpering tick-phobic heap on the bottom of the shield.
“Okay, so we know it’s there, but it doesn’t seem to have any destructive properties—it’s not a hook or a bomb like Iris had. It’s not driving her insane. What is it doing?”
As Cory started to lower the shield bubble slowly, so as not to frighten its inhabitant, Max began to growl. When Teague looked at him, his upper lip was pulled back, and he was panting with his tongue out like a cat.
Teague allowed some of his wolf out and growled back.
Max shot up into the air, spitting, then landed at a crouch. It wasn’t until his knees hit the ground that he remembered who he was and what he was trying to do. He stood up fluidly and didn’t even brush at his clothes, just casually pretended it had never happened.
“It’s a bug,” he said shortly. “A supernatural bug. Whether she means to or not, that thing is spying on us.”
Teague pondered. “That would be a shitty bug,” he said after a moment. “It would be like the vampire bite for beginners, don’t you think? Before telepathy kicks in. You know—all emotions, no clear picture of what’s going on in her head or around her?”
Max studied his cuticles. “I don’t know. It’s not really just a dog bite, you know? It’s more of an… an elf bite. I say it’s a bug.”
Teague took a few paces forward, rubbed the base of his skull, then turned around and paced back. He ignored Cory, who was still sitting on the bench and apparently laughing at him and Max through her hand, because fuck that, this was important.
“I say it’s something else,” he pondered. “’Cause it’s blood. And this bitch has been using blood magic on us almost from the beginning. It’s like, I don’t know. It’s how the elf bitch finally broke into the hill—that thing on her arm.”
“But why so elaborate?” Cory mused. “Why not just attack us at school?”
Teague looked at her and smiled. She was so unassuming, but she’d gotten very used to being the center of the world. “Because you’re not the point, Miss Universe. Green’s the point. This whole thing has been about taking over his hill. She sees you and Brack as tools. She knew you’d take Cerise in—she’d seen you do it before with the happiness triplets and the jailbreak—so she sent something in this way. I say Cerise is maybe her way of getting through the shields.”
When Cory glared at the poor woman through the power bubble, Cerise was frightened enough to back into the bubble, hackles rising like a newly born beta pup.
“I didn’t mean to!” she protested, her voice not muffled in the least, proving she’d heard the entire conversation. “Please don’t chop my arm off or anything. I swear I didn’t mean to!”
Cory took a deep breath and looked down, rubbing the back of her neck. Very, very carefully she lowered the shield bubble.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” she said, sounding oh-so-weary. “I just need to fix the shields. Right now they’re based on tainted blood, but if we let you in, and you’ve got that blood mark under your skin, I don’t know how to… to tweak that.” She looked down at her burgeoning body and then looked up at Teague apologetically. “My, uh, usual way of charging to rework our defenses is right out.”
Teague shook his head. “This shouldn’t all be on your shoulders—”
“That’s my job!” she laughed, and the part of him that was a friend cracked wide open.
“Bullshit,” he snapped. “Bull. Shit. No. Just… no!” He paused, scrubbing at his face through his stubble, hoping for better words as she regarded him kindly.
“Teague, it’s just the way it is. I’m the weapon. I’ve been the weapon since I came here—it’s how you and I got to be friends. I can’t afford to be weak now that we’re under attack, and you know it!”
Max let out a sound between a “Hell no!” and a “Mreowl!” and Teague whirled to face her. “Your weaponry is not the sum total of your value to this hill, my lady,” he growled.
Cory waved him off, but he was so angry that his vision went red and he felt his snout elongate. It took a conscious effort—and a heavy-duty one at that—to force himself not to go hauling off into the wild blue decimating the rabbit population.
“Cerise, honey,” she said, her voice soothing, “I’m going to drop the shield. You are not in trouble in any way, do you understand? We just need to figure out what to do about the broken blood seal, okay? Not your fault. You found us. You needed to. Nobody’s ever gotten in trouble for coming to us when they didn’t mean any harm.”
Cerise nodded at her, her lower lip trembling. Cory looked at Teague and Max as though expecting something, then shook her head. “I so miss Green,” she muttered. With that she dropped the shields and held out her arms.
“C’mere, bunny,” she said kindly. “C’mere.”
Cerise threw herself at Cory, crying softly. “Get it off,” she whimpered. “He said it was a tick… get it off….”
“Shh….” Cory stroked her hair. “He just meant it’s under your skin, precious. Don’t worry. We’re going to talk to the vampires and feed you some more angel and elf blood and see if we can’t just sort of bleed it away, okay? You know, your blood replaces itself every six weeks. What’s it been, three?”
Cerise nodded, full lower lip quivering. “I don’t want bad things here, Lady. You’ve been so nice to me, and I’m so scared.”
To Teague’s horror, Cory’s eyes grew bright. “It’s okay, really. We’re all scared. But we’re stronger together, right? You stay here and huddle under Shepherd’s wings—he’s very protective, you know. If anything bad goes down, he’ll keep you safe.”
Shepherd nodded as though he hadn’t thought of any other duty. Well, from what Teague had seen, he really hadn’t.
With murmuring little noises, maybe learned, maybe instinctive, Shepherd moved in, his naked torso pale and beautiful and sexual in a way that would probably have horrified him. He gathered Cerise into his arms and then nodded Jefi over. Without a word exchanged, Jefischa took over the cuddle duty, and Shepherd turned to Cory and Teague.
“My lady?”
Cory smiled—but even though she obviously put her whole heart into her smile, Teague could tell she was getting tired. When he threw a look over his shoulder, Max nodded and disappeared down the stairs. Yeah, it was time to pull in the big guns.
“My lord angel,” she said playfully—but also with greatest sincerity, “what can I do for you?”
“I’ve given my blood freely to help you fight this terrible battle, and I would give even more to preserve this place.”
Cory’s lips parted softly—oh, yes. She was taking this very seriously. “We’re very grateful. Please let us know if you are giving too much. Jefischa as well.”
Shepherd nodded. “It’s just that, until this moment, I had never… touched what we were fighting. And now that I have?”
“Yes?” Cory said eagerly, leaning forward in a way that had to be cramping her stomach.
“I recognize it, but… it’s masked somehow. There is something very old and very evil and very powerful masking that blood from our gaze. But now that I know what I’m… tasting, I think I can tell you where it is.”
“And I can tell you why it’s hidden,” Teague said, dancing in his excitement. “That’s why I brought her out here, my lady. She had something very interesting to report, and I needed to make sure the intel was good.”
Cory leaned back and shifted, a look of pain crossing her face. She put one hand behind her to brace herself and then pushed up from the bench, standing and stretching when she reached her feet. Teague realized with a pang that the granite bench—the one with Adrian’s likeness on it that she and the elves loved so much—was probably hell on her back. She must have been coming out here for some peace, and he’d thrown work at her instead.
“So,” she urged, leaning forward on one foot and rounding her shoulders, pushing out. “Spill! What would hide that power from us? What did she see?”
Teague reached out and touched the small of her back, fixing her form. “You’ll throw it out otherwise,” he cautioned. Then—“Okay, so the thing is, Cerise there said she and her boyfriend went out to a party up in Colfax. It was a big deal, right? Getting out of Sacramento, whatever. So to her it’s a bunch of driving out to nowhere, every road is acres of turns, she doesn’t remember any names. But they get to the place, and it’s like we thought—sort of a big mansion, one of those places bought before the crash that people couldn’t keep up on the payments for. Makes sense, right? Except there had been previous squatters there—she said she could tell, because there were a couple of buildings that looked like munitions storage. Concrete, lots of steel—no place you’d put a cow in, right?”